Blaze Across the Firmament

Recalling an altarpiece in form, the recent triptych Sea of Stars (2020) comprises three of Connor’s Lick Observatory sublimation prints. The artist digitally layers an image of an ammonite — an extinct, fossilized marine mollusk — onto one panel, and a wind-blowing Zephyr on another, transforming the work into a rumination on our place in — and impact on — the world and in the universe. “It’s about where we are in the largest context,” Connor explains, “and a warning of the fragility of our earth.”

Binh Danh utilizes early photographic processes to examine connections between history, identity, and place, often within the context of his own experiences as a Vietnamese-American. Blaze Across the Firmament includes a selection of Danh’s early chlorophyll prints, in which comets, eclipses, and other astronomical images are printed directly onto foliage using the plants’ natural photosynthesizing abilities. The delicate and fragile works are then cast into blocks of resin.

Chlorophyll prints from Danh’s 2005 series Ancestral Altar of the Cosmos combine celestial imagery with portraits of those executed at Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The resulting objects serve as memorials to victims of the Cambodian genocide, reclaiming their identities, and suggest notions of the afterlife and the interconnectedness of all living things.

Created over the course of a year, from fall to summer, Ebtekar’s Zenith (V), 2015, features hand-painted white clouds — stylized designs that draw from Iranian coffeehouse paintings — drifting over a deep blue cyanotype image of the cosmos from the Hubble Space Telescope archives. Each of the four panels was printed on a single day of each season, at the hour when the sun was at its zenith — a single artwork capturing the passage of time across hours, seasons, and millennia.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1923 - 2019) spent over half a century creating stunning mirrored mosaics, sculptures, and works on paper that recall both the sacred geometry of Persian art and the reductive abstraction of the 20th century. Light — reflected from the dazzling surfaces of her work — is central to her practice. Recalling her initial visit to the elaborate mirrored interiors of Iran’s famed Shāh Chérāgh (King of Light) shrine, a site of artistic inspiration, Farmanfarmaian wrote: “I imagined myself standing inside a many-faceted diamond and looking out at the movement and fluid light, all solids fractured and dissolved in brilliance, in space, in sun.” This profound experience — at once earthly and celestial — was one that the artist sought to share through her work. In this exhibition, a group of small mirrored mosaics, their pieces configured into complex stellar forms, are arranged into a constellation that echoes the artist’s lapidary vision of the heavens.

A pioneering painter, musician, and filmmaker, Mike Henderson has been an integral part of the Bay Area art scene for over fifty years. Cloud Nine, a large-scale, mixed media collage on canvas created in 1977, is a pivotal work created at a time when Henderson was searching for new modes of expression following the tumult and violence of the 1960s. Henderson calls his works from this period “space modules.” In these surreal dreamscapes, hovering shapes appear to have landed upon an alien world; Henderson’s experiments with abstract forms and space are expressed as literal forms in (outer) space. Comprising acrylic paint applied with an airbrush or splattered across the surface, charred canvas which the artist burnt in the oven, and colorful pieces of fabric found at Goodwill, Cloud Nine carries a host of associations, from the space race and the 1969 lunar landing, to prehistoric cave paintings of early civilizations, and is a testament to Henderson’s ceaseless invention.

Cirkut 4 (2015) takes McCaw’s documentation of the sun to ambitious new lengths. Here, the sun rises and falls behind faraway peaks in a graceful, rhythmic sine wave. Working with a modified 1913 Cirkut camera — a rotating camera that, mounted on a tripod, captured the earliest panoramic images — and a 10-foot long scroll of vintage silver-based paper, the work captures sunsets and sunrises in a single, continuous exposure lasting 48 hours in the Arctic Circle. The making of these photographs involved a constant dialogue between careful planning, calibration, and an element of chance. Weather, a constant if unseen force in McCaw’s work, becomes all the more tan­gible in this series. The frequent interruptions of Arctic winds and storms, often in the evenings, appear as flashes of white against an otherwise calm, grey horizon. The works in Cirkut embody both the immediacy (and dramatic unpredictability) of nature, and the languid passing of time.